Tracking Student Attendance at After-School Clubs
Knowing where your students are – whether for safeguarding, record-keeping, or even to celebrate great attendance – is essential. Recently, an Assistant Headteacher asked if students could use QR codes to quickly register their presence at after-school activities. The short answer? Yes, they can! Here’s a straightforward system you can set up in just a few steps. This assumes your school uses the Google Ecosystem:
✅ Step 1: Create Your Google Form
1️⃣ Open Google Forms and create a new form.
2️⃣ Add a required question for the name of the activity.
3️⃣ In the form settings, make sure to collect verified email addresses – this ensures you know exactly who has signed in.
✅ Step 2: Get the Pre-Fill Link
1️⃣ In Google Forms, open the pre-fill tool.
2️⃣ Enter the name of the activity you want students to register for.
3️⃣ Click ‘Get link’ and then ‘Copy link’.
✅ Step 3: Build the Activity Spreadsheet
1️⃣ In your spreadsheet (Google Sheets works perfectly), create column headings:
- Column A: Activity
- Column B: Link
- Column C: QR Code
2️⃣ Enter each activity name in Column A.
3️⃣ In cell B2, use this formula, replacing the placeholder URL with your own copied link (make sure to delete the word “Football” from the URL!):
=concat("https://docs.google.com/…/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.529764716=", A2)
The ‘concat’ function concatenates text together to create a complete prefill link.
4️⃣ In cell C2, use this formula to generate a QR code image:
=IMAGE("https://quickchart.io/qr?text=" & encodeurl(B2) & "&size=200&format=png")5️⃣ Use the fill handle to quickly fill the rest of your table.
✅ Step 4: Print and Use the QR Codes
Print out the generated QR codes. Students can now scan them on arrival to your after-school clubs.
✅ Step 5: Check the Register
1️⃣ Head back to Google Forms and view the responses tab to see your attendance register in real time!
2️⃣ Right mouse click on column B and use ‘smart chips’ to convert the email address into the name of the person.
📝 A Few Final Notes
- This is a simple system, but it does the job!
- You may need to think about alternatives for students without a QR reader (like a backup paper register).
- I’m currently working on turning this into a web-based project to make it even easier – so stay tuned!
- We haven’t yet used this system so it’ll be interesting to see if it works!
And there you have it! A quick, tech-savvy way to track who’s where – and to make safeguarding and rewarding attendance just that bit easier.
